


Abyssal Plane

by levendis



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alien Biology, Anxiety Attacks, Body Horror, F/M, Tentacles, Transformation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-02
Updated: 2016-08-02
Packaged: 2018-07-28 22:34:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7659472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/levendis/pseuds/levendis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Count to ten," she could hear him distantly saying. "And do the Hokey-Pokey. That’s what I do when I have an existential crisis." The further adventures of Clarathotep.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Abyssal Plane

**Author's Note:**

> for anon, who prompted: Clara nylarothotep sequel again: focus on pyschological and body horror. What other sort of changes is the creature making to Clara? What does it want? Is the Doctor even trying to do anything about it at this point?
> 
> A sequel to [this fic](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7374001)

“I want to show you something,” Clara said.

The Doctor peered up at her from under the console, goggles obscuring half his face. “So show me,” he said, wiping his grease-stained fingers off on his jumper. “You know preamble makes me nervous.”

She smiled, something wonky or watery about it because he pushed his goggles up, splaying his hair back, and made the intense frown that was his version of a concerned expression.

“What is it?” he asked softly. He tensed up but stayed where he was, wedged in a hatch and tangled up in glowing, twitching cables. He’d gotten better at reading her cues, lately.

“This,” she said, biting her lower lip. Slowly, she unbuttoned her blouse, slipped it off her shoulders. “Look.”

“I’m looking. Not sure what I’m supposed to be seeing that I haven’t seen before. Did you get a new breast containment system?” He made a crude honking gesture at his chest.

“It’s called a bra, and no, that’s not - look, okay?” She leaned back, hands framing one of the porous spots on her side. The membrane pulsed under her touch, the orifice behind just barely visible. “It’s getting worse.”

“Worse.” Like that wasn’t a word he knew what to do with, in this context.

The membrane split easily under her thumb, and she almost reached in before her brain caught up and she flinched back. A wave of nausea and staticky, breathless panic washing over her.

 _Count to ten_ , she could hear him distantly saying. _And do the Hokey-Pokey. That’s what I do when I have an existential crisis._

 

* * *

 

She came back to herself. Put her blouse back on, did the buttons up with shaking hands. “Used to only be there sometimes, right? Like an emotional response, whenever I was scared or - turned-on, or whatever. But now it’s all the time, I’m always like this, and.” She stopped, afraid that the next noise out of her mouth would be a sob.

He squeezed out of the hatch and rolled around a bit, flailing at the tubes, before stumbling up and over to her. He gave her the tight, desperate hug he’d recently become so fond of.

And she was, in fact, crying now, but at least he couldn’t see.

“It’s okay to be scared,” he murmured, face buried in her neck. “But you are you, you will always be you, regardless of the - the container.”

It was a nice thought.

 

* * *

 

The cables and wires and tubes were pulled farther out of the console, now, snaking up to the mezzanine. The Doctor stepped carefully over them, arms wrapped around a large cardboard box.

Clara wiped the last of her ruined make-up off, cold cream and a kitchen sponge. He’d gotten it half-right. The world felt a little bit further away than usual, less familiar, artifice more apparent. And she felt, what. Nothing. Empty, drained-out.

Inside the cardboard box was, among other things, a Polaroid camera. He ripped open a pack of film with his teeth, inserted it into the camera, pointed it at her. She grinned. The picture shot out, he flapped it rhythmically over his head. She stopped grinning.

“Haunted camera,” he explained. “Well, possessed. Inhabited. Anyway. It’s a sort of Dorian Gray thing, takes pictures of people as they really are. Transformative or symbiotic or shrouded creatures, it’ll show whatever they’re currently not. The werewolf in human form will be shown as a wolf, in wolf form will be shown as a human.”

“Ever take a selfie?”

He smiled crookedly. “Yeah. I’m a lens flare, apparently.”

She did wonder, sometimes.

The picture developing and the feeling of the floor, the whole universe dropping out from under her, dizzying and some unnamed emotion. A strangeness. He held the Polaroid close to his face, eyebrows scrunching.

“So what am I?”

The Doctor shrugged, and flipped the Polaroid over, arm outstretched.

“Oh,” she said calmly, and sat down.

 

* * *

 

 _Humans are one of the most adaptable species out there,_ he’d said, rubbing her back. _Flexible, eager genetics. There’s whole civilizations of half-Human hybrids out there. Earth in your time is honestly something of an aberration, in the grand scheme of things. The second your lot make contact with another species, your racial purity is thrown out the window. That’s how you survive for so long. And you never lose what it is that makes you, you. The Human spirit perseveres._

It was a nice speech. Pretty words don’t mean much, though.

 

* * *

 

Yetzirah was 85% water. The TARDIS materialized on one of the few landmasses, a rocky island in the middle of an endless sea. The black stone was wet and slippery under Clara’s feet, and it was raining, but she looked up at the pale-green sky and across the grey water and breathed in the cold salt air and she felt something shift inside her.

A tug at her heart, something approaching nostalgia.

“My best guess,” the Doctor said, voice raised against the noise of the waves crashing against the shore. “For where your symbiont came from.”

She’d started getting used to that word. Symbiont. An imprecise name for the foreign DNA that had altered her, the genetic pattern that had re-written her.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

She considered, eyes closed, letting her body come to rest. The meditation techniques he’d taught her. “Like the sea is calling me,” she said.

“So go.”

She opened her eyes. He was standing, hands in his pockets, damp and fading grey-black against the grey-black rocks. Retreating. He shrugged, and for the first time she actually knew what he meant.

The water swirled up and around her as she walked into the depths, welcoming her back.

 

* * *

 

 _It’s okay,_ the Doctor had said, possibly, when Clara forgot what she’d been, before. He wouldn’t say how long it’d been, how long she’d been in the sea. But she’d been different, when she washed up onto the shore. Loose and other and foreign to herself - or more herself - or something, anyway. She wore a body that moved differently, felt differently. Experienced things differently. He’d picked her up and carried her back to the TARDIS and she’d _seen_ him. A brief moment of awareness of what he really was before she blacked out.

 

* * *

 

Two arms and two legs, a head. The Doctor provided pictures, the TARDIS - Clara’s hands, shifting between fingers and tentacles, laced into the psychic circuits - had provided raw data, an obscure sense of love and understanding. Her memories, shaky and scattered, offering details: the scar on her knee when ten-year-old Clara had fallen off her bicycle, that one hair that insisted on growing next to her left nipple, the mole on her upper arm. She reassembled herself.

And the Doctor disappeared back under the console, surrounded in sparking, buzzing tubes. Goggles on, some makeshift device in hand, sparking things apart and back together again.

She ran her hands over her body, hoping she’d gotten it right.

“You’ve far better control than me,” he said. “I’m impressed.”

“Thank you.” Sounding more confident than she really was. Fake it ‘til you make it.

He welded the hatch cover back on and crawled out, pushed his goggles back into the wilds of his hair. And he stared at her, like he was working himself up to something. She’d gotten better at reading his body language lately.

“I wanna show you something,” he said.

“So show me.”

He shrugged, grinned, and flicked a switch. And everything changed.

A twisting, crackling ball of energy in the place of his familiar container. A haze, nebulous, glowing red and bright blue. _The perception filter was on so long it got stuck. I unstuck it. Sorry it took so long.  
_

She looked down at herself, the sprawling edges of her. Flickering between familiar-human and whatever she kept inside her. Both of them her, equally.

 _So this is us,_ the Doctor thought. _What d'you think?_

She reached an arm out, the tip of it curling around the arcing, crackling tendril he was offering. The TARDIS humming around them, holding them close.

 _Not bad,_ she thought. And she pulled him towards her, into her, her into him; a hand held, fractal, iterative. All of her embracing all of him. They exhaled, and relaxed, and there was the sense that one or both of them was crying. Whatever it was either of them were, linked tight. She couldn’t say how long it was before the switch was flicked off, or how long after that they stayed wrapped around each other, human shaped, breathing in tandem.

“Anyway,” he said, face wet and eyes red, when he finally pulled away. “Now that that’s over with. Where next?”

“Oh, I dunno.” She sniffed, coughed the phlegm out from her throat. “You fixed the randomizer?”

“Partially.”

She grinned, and took his hand; their free hands on the button, pressing down together.


End file.
